Thanks to all our great skytruthers who helped us find all the ponds that look like this!

Thanks to all of our FrackFinders– Project Dart Frog is complete! Many thanks to all of our volunteers for helping us get through this phase of the FrackFinder PA project. We had over 250 registered users power through 7,835 images to help us figure out if the ponds they saw in aerial imagery were related to fracking or not. Now if 7,835 images sounds like a lot, consider this. Because we really like accuracy, those images were viewed by 10 different sets of eyes. That means our 250 frackfinders looked at 78,350 images! If it wasn’t for YOUR help, our small team at SkyTruth headquarters would still be toiling through imagery.

While we work on finalizing the results, we’ve already got a another project ready for you to help us with: FrackFinder PA – Project Tadpole 2013. Some of our FrackFinding veterans may be thinking, “Wait…didn’t we already go through Project Tadpole?” We did. Back in August you all knocked out 90,000 image analysis tasks in only 28 day, but that was only for the years 2005, 2008, and 2010. Now we have brand new imagery from 2013 and we need your help to identify how fracking has spread across PA in the three years since the last aerial survey. All you need to do is tell us if you see a wellpad at each site we show you…

Ready? Just hit this button, sign up (or sign back in), and off you go!

Just to recap for you, FrackFinder PA is a multi-phase effort to map drilling and hydraulic fracturing across Pennsylvania using crowd-sourced image analysis of satellite and aerial imagery. Ultimately, these projects will create a comprehensive, public map of drilling and fracking in Pennsylvania. After Pennsylvania, our goal is to create this map for the entire United States.

You may also be thinking, “I don’t live in Pennsylvania. I can’t possibly help.” FrackFinder is not a boots-on-the-ground type mission, you can do this from the comfort of your own home, anywhere in the world. We like to think of skytruthing as a sort of “armchair citizen science” that can have a really powerful contribution to our understanding of issues like fracking.

As you probably know, the results from our FrackFinder projects are informing a Johns Hopkins University study on the public health impacts of drilling and fracking. Thanks to you we’ve already delivered two unique datasets to them that would not have been possible without you.

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